'The Middle Passage' Visits Slave Trade

During "The Middle Passage," the hugeness of nature is never in doubt as a clipper ship glides across the ocean's expanse.

But apart from a brief roiling storm, the sea is calm. Nature is an onlooker, burdened with no role in this abominable enterprise. This is the business of men _ profiteers who engaged in the sale of fellow humans.

To mark Black History Month, HBO is airing "The Middle Passage," a suitably disturbing encounter with the slave trade that prevailed for many centuries leading up to the Civil War. Conceived as neither the standard docudrama nor heart-rending spectacle, the film is a meditation on wholesale sin that lulls the viewer to a new understanding. It airs Saturday at 10:05 p.m. EST.

The so-called Middle Passage was that leg of the Europeans' triangular route carrying human stock from West Africa to the Americas. The voyage to the New World took as long as three months, with each ship's cargo _ men, women and children by the hundreds _ chained and abused and terrified.

"The child who looks out over this ocean cannot imagine the horror it holds," begins the narrator, an African native whose spirit-self recounts, entirely in voice-over, the long-past tale of "monumental genocide and enslavement" that doomed him to be "just another black body in a sea of despair."

His words, however redolent of grief and rage, are voiced with doleful restraint by Djimon Hounsou (the films "Gladiator," "Amistad" and, in a 1994 recurring role, "ER").

Their lyricism is thanks to novelist-screenwriter Walter Mosley ("Devil in a Blue Dress"), who adapted the narration from its original French.

Part of the story must be told in raw numbers (for instance: four centuries of slave trade; millions of victims), and, spoken aloud, they help convey the scale of this holocaust.

But the accompanying images capture the horror in another way: a vivid smallness. Many of the scenes are striking in their stillness, like a series of tableaux vivants. Other sequences unwind in languorous skip-frame or slow motion. Just as no one on-screen ever utters a word, likewise the action is muted.

A mouse skitters over a man prostrate against the planks in the hold, almost motionless as milky fluid spills from his mouth. "The heat is unbearable," the narrator says, "as is the pitch and roll and the vomit that follows."

The effect is stark, even shocking. And all the more so for being subdued.

The Africans' humanity is betrayed in almost countless ways. Like stockyard animals, they are regularly herded on deck for a bit of exercise, accompanied by a whip and a sailor with a fiddle.

"They forced us to dance to their despicable tunes," says the narrator. "We, who have so much music in us."

A dreadful, life-sapping routineness settles in. And not only for the captives, but also for their captors, sailors who pray to God for safety "and beseech him to allow them safe passage to their destination," declares the narrator with undisguised disgust.

For him and the viewer, the voyage is broken up by flashbacks to a happy life in Africa.

"What have we done to so enrage our ancient ancestors?" he poses.

But, like nature, otherworldly factors don't apply here, as he finally acknowledges: It was his own brutal prince who sold him and fellow tribesmen to the Europeans.

"I was traded for a barrel of gun powder," he explains, "in a time when a man's worth was measured in lengths of precious cloth or in the weight of a tub of copper."

Besides rampant sickness and starvation on the ship, suicide among the prisoners is common. But with the vessel's approach to the American shore, now carrying fewer than half of the 600 souls abducted, those able to "endure the unendurable … have been given the necessary strength to endure the nightmare of slavery," the narrator says darkly.

It takes nothing away from the drama to disclose that he isn't one of those survivors. He is slaughtered when, panicked by the sight of land and what it may mean, he goes on the attack.

"I think I may have bitten into the neck of the first sailor that passed me," he says. "Whatever I did, I did it with such passion and resolve that they had to pierce my body with a sword many times over, before I would let go."

Not that he ever really does, of course. Nor will "The Middle Passage" soon turn loose of those who see it.

'YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE': Despite the fact that more than 80,000 Americans will need organ transplants this year, thousands will go unfulfilled because of a shortage of donors. A solution few in the medical field will discuss is the buying and selling of human organs. CBS News' "48 Hours" uncovered a black-market organ transplant trade in the United States and abroad, including a flourishing kidney transplant business in Lima, Peru. Peter Van Sant's report airs 10 p.m. EST Monday.